At once and for all

This chapter reviews the historical nexus between human rights exceptionalism and domestic inequality in the United States, charts post-Beijing shifts in this dynamic and assesses the current status of US women in three Beijing Platform for Action (BPA) areas, political participation, economic opportunity, and freedom from violence. The 2002 founding of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN), the nation's first domestic human rights membership organization, exemplifies the Beijing effect. The domestic social movements of the twentieth century did much to remedy this divisive legacy, and both US human rights accountability and American women's status improved. The US exceptionalism and systemic inequality across gender, race, ethnicity, and class persist and imperil both America's moral leadership and women's transformative power. Further progress requires the US government and the US women's movement to recognize that human rights exceptionalism and domestic inequality are two sides of the same tarnished coin and to resolve, at once and for all, to dispense with them both.